E.B. White "Once More to the Lake"

AGENDA:

READING:
Read E. B. White's (author of Charlotte's Web) "Once More to the Lake."  This famous essay is a nature essay, but it's main thesis has to do with life experiences--specifically father and son relationships as well as memory.


Go to:
https://genius.com/E-b-white-once-more-to-the-lake-annotated
or
http://wheretheclassroomends.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/White_OnceMoretotheLake1.pdf

Audiobook:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehbtwHySuJA

Analysis:
http://study.com/academy/lesson/once-more-to-the-lake-summary-theme-analysis.html

Please answer the following questions on the blog:

1 What is the central idea of White's essay—the key feeling he evokes, the key concern he  expresses? Cite a passage that you think evokes the main feeling or idea most directly. 

2 How would you describe the mood of the piece, the tone of voice? Cite one or two  passages where you hear this tone most clearly. 

3 Find two images that White uses to show how the lake has changed since he was there  as a boy and comment on them. 

4 Find two images that suggest that the lake has not changed and comment on them? 

5 Find one or two images that seem to convey both change and sameness and comment  on them. 

6 What contrast does White make between the sea and a lake, and why does he make this  contrast in his opening paragraph? 

7 What happens in the closing paragraph? How does it reinforce or give some closure to  the central concerns of the essay? How does it make you feel?

Take the quiz (quizzes) mostly for fun and a check on your reading comprehension:

http://grammar.about.com/od/tests/a/ebwlakequiz.htm

Writing:
Continue to work on your essays!

Sedaris/Nature Essays

AGENDA:

Write, write, write...

When you need a break, visit some of the websites mentioned in previous posts and READ!

Sedaris/Nature Essays--Creative Nonfiction

AGENDA:

Share "Teach This Poem"

Continue discussion of Dillard/Doyle essays.

Work on your own creative nonfiction this week.

Check out this site when you need a break:

https://www.creativenonfiction.org/

https://www.creativenonfiction.org/online-reading/essays 

Happy Valentine's Day!

Brian Doyle/Annie Dillard-Nature Writing

AGENDA:

EQ: According to Brian Doyle’s essay, “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever, how should the ideal nature essay develop and affect the reader”? Do Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels” and Doyle’s “Fishering” measure up to the criteria Doyle presents?



 Read aloud Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels” and discuss basic questions: 
1. Why does Annie Dillard use the account about the weasel fixed by the jaws to the eagle’s throat? What does this suggest about a weasel’s life and what is Dillard trying to suggest about our lives, including her own? 
2. Is it possible for humans to “live any way we want”? Can we live like the weasel? Or in what ways are we able to live like the weasel? 
3. Analyze the author’s use of figurative language to achieve her purpose. 
4. Any echoes of Thoreau’s “Where I Lived”? 
Link: http://www.courses.vcu.edu/ENG200-lad/dillard.htm

Silently read Brian Doyle’s “Fishering” and annotate it. 
Link: http://www.hcn.org/issues/317/16163

 

PERIOD TWO (Rm. 238): In small groups, read Brian Doyle’s “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever.” 
Link: https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-greatest-nature-essay-ever/

As a group, determine the criteria/formula for successful nature writing according to Doyle’s essay and answer the following question, providing specific examples from the texts:

Do you think that the organization of Dillard’s nature essay on weasels is similar to the organization of Doyle’s “Fishering”? Does it follow the formula from “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever”?

Nature Writing

AGENDA:

Definition:
A form of creative nonfiction in which the natural environment (or a narrator's encounter with the natural environment) serves as the dominant subject.
"In critical practice," says Michael P. Branch, "the term 'nature writing' has usually been reserved for a brand of nature representation that is deemed literary, written in the speculative personal voice, and presented in the form of the nonfiction essay. Such nature writing is frequently pastoral or romantic in its philosophical assumptions, tends to be modern or even ecological in its sensibility, and is often in service to an explicit or implicit preservationist agenda" ("Before Nature Writing," in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. by K. Armbruster and K.R. Wallace, 2001).

http://web.monroecc.edu/jnelson/thoreau

Read:
Diane Ackerman's "Love's Vocabulary"

Writing Studio

AGENDA:

Work on your summary/analysis of Sedaris and your own "Sedaris" essay.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

AGENDA:

Read along and listen to a reading of "Me Talk Pretty One Day"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5cAceXWCt0
pg. 166

https://sites.google.com/site/johannanrijken/project-1
Read an additional short story of your choice and write a summary/analysis of that story.

Work on your own "Sedaris" essay.

Post a reply for Questions 1-4 from previous post.